Conference "The Euro Knot. The Single Currency and European Citizenship in the Time of Community Turmoil" | Brussels- European Parliament (Place du Luxembourg, Building Altiero Spinelli) (Belgium)

Nowadays the EU is facing one of the most difficult challenges of its history, due to the euro crisis, its causes and its consequences both at national and Community levels. Among the most concerning risks there is the one of forgetting citizens, both in their actual condition and in the role they can play for the development of the European project. The present debate in the Community public sphere on the future of the euro has indeed focused mostly on macro-economic and financial factors, rather on the citizens’ standpoint.

Fully understanding this standpoint and designing policy measures able to give value to the link between citizens and the European construction is a task of the utmost importance. In this framework, the European Parliament and FONDACA have decided to jointly convene the conference. The event aims at sharing with policy makers and relevant stakeholders the results of the research and dialogue program “The Other Side of the Coin” that FONDACA has been carrying out since 2009, involving scholars from Europe and America, in order to investigate the non-economic dimensions of the single currency: namely, those linked to culture, social relations, political community building and consumption, which received poor attention both from the scientific and policy community. In the conference the main results of the scientific reflection on the relationship between the single currency and European citizenship would be shared by European and international leading experts in the field and discussed with representatives of institutions, banks and enterprises, citizens’ and consumers’ organizations, think tanks and media, at the end of defining not only an appropriate research agenda, but also policies aimed at making visible and strengthening the relation of the single currency with the European citizenship-building process.